There's been a bunch of Windows Phone 7 reviews out there, and most of them come to the same conclusion: great piece of software for a 1.0 release, but it does miss a few vital features. The Ars Technica review, as usual very in-depth, highlights one particular aspect of the platform that speaks to me: Windows Phone 7 has a sense of humour.

No, there's compulsory hardware buttons like the back button and the 'start' button. The problem with hw keyboards is the OS/apps have inconsistent support for landscape mode. That's why the 7 phones mostly have Pre-style bottom keyboards.

And if Win 7 proper is a 'step forward', it's not a very big one. It's an incremental improvement over Vista but it still provides an incredibly anaemic and unfriendly user environment. One release after they introduced HW accelerated compositing, they think to include a full-screen zoom feature (which is easily the best argument for compositing to begin with) but of course, they do a horrible job of it. They decided that OSX's dock was just broken enough that it deserved to be ported to Windows. They added that god-awful dynamic tiling with aero snap, yet windows still don't exhibit basic intuitive behaviour, like edge resistance when one window passes over another, or reaches the edge of the screen. They still haven't fixed the mess that is the start menu and the control panel and no, search is a poor substitute for a tidy layout. They've further muddied UI concepts by allowing apps to hide functionality in their taskbar entries: just as you thought they were clamping down on systray abuse, they merely decide to move it to another components of the UI that should be agnostic and provide only consistent, higher-level functionality. And of course, just as people were coming to grips with Vista's ridiculous mishmash of titlebars, menubars, toolbars and all the composites thereof, the Windows devs submit to the Office devs and decide to copy the ribbon widgets over to Win 7. /offtopic rant

No, there's compulsory hardware buttons like the back button and the 'start' button. The problem with hw keyboards is the OS/apps have inconsistent support for landscape mode. That's why the 7 phones mostly have Pre-style bottom keyboards.

Is that the result of Microsoft or the application vendors themselves? Has Microsoft taken on handling the orientation of the device and how Applications adjust to it or is each application dependent on the developer doing the right thing? its one aspect of Mac OS X that I appreciate, Apple automate a lot of stuff and encourage developers to use those high level API's instead of 'going it alone' and re-inventing the wheel. The I/O Kit being the best example where developers automatically inheret a whole heap of features without needing to even think about it such as power management and not having to duplicate common code found in all drivers.

And if Win 7 proper is a 'step forward', it's not a very big one. It's an incremental improvement over Vista but it still provides an incredibly anaemic and unfriendly user environment. One release after they introduced HW accelerated compositing, they think to include a full-screen zoom feature (which is easily the best argument for compositing to begin with) but of course, they do a horrible job of it.

What I think is even more horrible is they develop Direct2D/DirectWrite and yet not a single component of Windows 7 actually uses these new API's. One thing Apple does well - they're always dogfooding their own API's so that they reflect real life scenarios rather than 'white board hypotheticals' that barely resemble reality. One could argue that they limited time and had to focus on addressing the immediate concerns before moving onto those issues you talked about - even Windows 7 developers have acknowledge that there was a list of things they wanted to fix up but a limited amount of time and resources they had to address it in a single release.

They decided that OSX's dock was just broken enough that it deserved to be ported to Windows.

What is wrong with dock? I can't understand all this hate of the dock? most of it by people who can't be bothered actually learning how to use it properly. I have a single application with multiple windows, I right click on the icon in the dock and select from the menu which one I wish to bring forward, what is so difficult about that? I'd love to know exactly what is broken about it because it seems to be like 'the cool thing to do' to bash the dock but give no specifics why outside of a few niche scenarios that most users will never come across.

They added that god-awful dynamic tiling with aero snap, yet windows still don't exhibit basic intuitive behaviour, like edge resistance when one window passes over another, or reaches the edge of the screen. They still haven't fixed the mess that is the start menu and the control panel and no, search is a poor substitute for a tidy layout. They've further muddied UI concepts by allowing apps to hide functionality in their taskbar entries: just as you thought they were clamping down on systray abuse, they merely decide to move it to another components of the UI that should be agnostic and provide only consistent, higher-level functionality. And of course, just as people were coming to grips with Vista's ridiculous mishmash of titlebars, menubars, toolbars and all the composites thereof, the Windows devs submit to the Office devs and decide to copy the ribbon widgets over to Win 7. /offtopic rant [/q]

Those problems are related to Windows in general rather than windows 7 - as I have noted in the past, what I'd love to see is someone take the IRIX Indigo desktop, modernise it but keep the same lay out and it would be a great UI. The problem is what is required for Windows would require such a radical change I don't think the customer base would be willing to stomach the change - we've got idiots here who crapped on about the 'super bar' being a 'sell out' to Mac OS X - yes, mature adults on this forum saying such utter crap and such views actually being given respect. It confuses me when such discussions take place but what can one do other than moan and groan over a cup of tea?

Is that the result of Microsoft or the application vendors themselves?

MS, read the Ars review.

its one aspect of Mac OS X that I appreciate, Apple automate a lot of stuff and encourage developers to use those high level API's instead of 'going it alone' and re-inventing the wheel.

Which is why hw accelerated flash was such a hard slog? And despite the immediate oversights with things such as Direct2D perhaps not having happened, I frankly don't see the need to 'dog food' your own APIs. If it ain't broke, don't fix it and lets face it: Paint not using Direct2D and Wordpad not using DirectWrite is the least of Windows' problems.

Nitpick time:

What is wrong with dock?

That's a question.

I can't understand all this hate of the dock?

That is not.

And the dock is horribly designed: it doesn't scale well if you do use it as a launcher; doesn't distinguish between launchers and running apps; the icons are abstract and meaningless to anyone who isn't intimately familiar with the icons, or aren't adept at storing bitmaps in their brains; text tooltips, like taskbar thumbnails in Vista/7/Compiz/Kwin, only appear for the currently selected item, which defeats the purpose since it assumes you've already found the item you want, else it would display them for all dock/tasklist entries; over time, Apple have gone about adding all kinds of exceptional behaviour for dock items, as if it weren't already ad hoc enough and last but not least, just like Windows, KDE, Gnome, Xfce, CDE, etc, they've put it at the bottom of the screen by default, which is entirely inconsistent with the visual hierarchy of any desktop environment* you can name. As for the dock condensing multiple windows into a single icon, I dare say Win 7 does a better job of it (although I despise this behaviour in general), although this basic behabviour has been present since XP; if you didn't encounter it, it was probably because the OEM disabled it.

*explicitly making the distinction between 'desktop' and phone environments: touch screens warrant flipping the UI paradigm upside down, else your hand would obscure the screen, plus it's more difficult to reach the top of the screen when only using one hand.

we've got idiots here who crapped on about the 'super bar' being a 'sell out' to Mac OS X - yes, mature adults on this forum saying such utter crap and such views actually being given respect.

You know damn well that wasn't the point of my criticism, don't be a douchebag. Ripping off good ideas is second best only to having your own good ideas, while ripping off demonstrably bad ones is worse than coming up with your own and having it fail. In many cases, it's better that you do rip off someone else, than be different for the hell of it and create something mediocre; I wish MS ripped off Compiz's Full-screen zoom, instead of creating that rigid push-model panning mess they call full-screen zoom. As it is, they did rip off something from Compiz: the interactive thumbnails for condensed taskbar entries I mentioned earlier and by Jove, they did a better job of it than Compiz's Group/Tile plugin.

No, there's compulsory hardware buttons like the back button and the 'start' button. The problem with hw keyboards is the OS/apps have inconsistent support for landscape mode. That's why the 7 phones mostly have Pre-style bottom keyboards.

And what's the problem with that exactly ?

The precise reason why I hate those wide screens they put on laptops now is that most of my everyday tasks require screens to be tall rather than wide. Everything which involves some form of list and large amounts of text, in fact.

For text, the reason is obvious : the wider the screen, the bigger the eye strain, so I end up always wasting up space on the sides of my screen, either because I resize windows to reduce their width or because some nice web developer did the job for me by putting a maximal width in his CSSs.

For lists, one has to make a distinction between usual, uni-dimensional lists, and bi-dimensional lists (or "grids"). For grids, it's the same eyestrain problem as with text. For usual lists, it's just a matter of wasting space : since list items have a well-defined height, you can only read x list items before scrolling, where x is dependent on the height (and not the width) of the screen.

Apple did not make the core of iOS portrait mode-friendly just for the fun of annoying landscape fans, it's just that portrait is the most useful screen layout in most cases.

Landscape mode is good for videos and games, granted, but in those areas it's available on WP7 afaik.

1. Portrait is good for some uses.
2. Landscape is good for some uses.
3. Based upon premises 1 and 2, it's therefore okay for 7 Phone to provide second-rate landscape support?

As for your wide screen laptop, if you feel compelled to maximise every window, there's really nothing left to say.

Although I agree with you about multi-column lists. I really wish more apps supported a layout like the ls command, where you read down each column alphabetically, rather than zig-zagging across. I keep my thunar windows no more than 240 pixels wide to avoid the brain strain. Unfortunately, the Control Panel explorer window resizes itself the moment you enter on of it's configuration dialogues (or at least the ones that open in the same explorer window) and it provides no 'details' view mode, like normal explorer windows.